That’s how long everyone has to finish assembling Fantasy: Best of 2004. Unfortunately we had to drop a story at the last minute because we couldn’t get permissions for it, so I made changes to the manuscript for the book this morning and emailed it off. It’s due in stores in 110 days. Wow!

Note (added later): I just took a look over at amazon, and they’re listing both year’s best as due out on 1 Feb, which is 85 days away! I’m a little thrown by this.

The remarkably productive Rich Horton continues his annual personal odyssey through the pages of the short fiction published in 2004, posting new summaries this weekend for Amazing Stories and Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine to his sffnet newsgroup. I pretty much agree with his summaries for both. Amazing Stories is mostly a media magazine, but some of the short fiction is pretty good, and ASIM deserve enormous applause for their regularity. I actually think they undersell themselves, but they’re worth checking out.

It’s getting toward year’s end. I’ve finished the two year’s best annuals and am getting started on Locus‘s annual recommended reading list. It also turns out that Amazon.com is doing it’s Best Books of 2004 thing, and have posted their Top 10 Editors’ Picks: Science Fiction & Fantasy. The list is:

1. The Dark Tower, Stephen King
2. The Charnel Prince, Greg Keyes
3. The First Heroes, Harry Turtledove & Noreen Doyle eds.
4. Stable Strategies and Others, Eileen Gunn
5. Heaven, Ian Stewart & Jack Cohen
6. Alphabet of Thorn, Patricia A. McKillip
7. Firethorn, Sarah Micklem
8. Shadowmarch, Tad Williams
9. The Nameless Day, Sara Douglass
10. The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad, Minister Faust

I loved the McKillip and Gunn books, liked the Faust and Turtledove/Doyle books, was gratified to see the Douglass and a little surprised to see the very new Williams novel. All in all, an interesting list.

Some years ago I co-edited two volumes of The Year’s Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy anthology series with Jeremy G. Byrne for HarperCollins Australia. I think we did a good job on the two books and I remain very proud of them. While it was disappointing that Jeremy and I didn’t get to continue the series, I was pleased to hear recently that Bill Congreve of MirrorDanse Books was going to produce a similar book covering 2004. Bill is an old friend, and very well qualified to edit a year’s best series covering Australian science fiction and fantasy.

It was with interest, therefore, that I saw in the latest Wildside Press newsletter that Prime and MirrorDanse would be co-publishing the book, and that it would be co-edited by Michelle Marquardt. The cover is pretty cool, and I’d encourage you to check it out. There’s some information on the book here.

I should add that, despite the extremely surprising re-use of the anthology series title, Bill and Michelle’s book is not a continuation Jeremy and my series of anthologies.